Thursday June 22 2006

Objectives and Objectivity

Hi Friends,

I’m happy to be back in NYC. And to be posting on the Thing. I was teaching in Georgia this year, outside Atlanta. It has taken me a while to get back into the spin here…

On my way back home in mid-May I visited first Earthaven, an eco-village outside Asheville, N.C., for an overnight stay. The place is off the grid except for telephone. I checked my email using homemade hydroelectric power from a stream. Crapped in a composting toilet. In Baltimore I ate crabcakes at the food court. It’s true, New York doesn’t know what a crab cake is. Then I stopped in to chat with Cira Pasqual Marquina, curator at the Contemporary Museum. She had just opened her new show, “Headquarters: Investigating the Creation of the Ghetto and the Prison Industrial Complex” (through August 27, 2006). We went to Red Emma’s infoshop and had lunch. Cira’s partner Chris Gilbert had left for Berkeley to serve as Matrix curator at the University of California museum there…

Karl Zinsmeister

President Bush's new chief domestic policy adviser, Karl Zinsmeister, writes about art:

When Art Becomes Inhuman
Karl Zinsmeister

"There are post-modernist works featured in this article that some may find disturbing. Our sole intention in including these works has been to illustrate the aesthetic and moral 'values' championed by the contemporary art establishment. We do not endorse these self-proclaimed 'artists'."
http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2002/Art_Inhuman/inhuman1.asp

Every once in a while the mailing list "nettime" takes a look at itself and many don't like what they see. This time the cause was a meeting of list members in Montreal called the Nettime North America Gathering.

The thread starts here:
report_on_NNA tobias c. van Veen

Vieille Femme aux Tatouages 2002

Gilles Barbier
Carré d'Art -Museé d'Art Contemporain
Place de la Maison Carrée in Nîmes, France
May 31st to September 17th, 2006
http://musees.nimes.fr/carreart/ac-carre.htm

By Joseph Nechvatal
http://www.nechvatal.net

Gilles Barbier’s remarkably ambitious exhibition at the Carré d'Art Museé d'Art Contemporain in Nîmes (Southern France) plays pithily with many current intellectual strands which interest me: net culture, artificial intelligence, image profusion, micro-organisms and science fiction (among others). But what struck me as most exact to its weird visual propositions was its deep reflection (one might even say brooding) on the theme of ignobility, and this grubbily shifted something in my head.

Whitney Biennial 06: An Afterword

Judith Rodenbeck and Trebor Scholz

The articles have been written and the doors of the Whitney Biennial are now closed.

It is an historical truism in cultural production that after World War II, but especially after the freedom struggles of the late 1950s and 1960s, to think of art along traditionalist lines as devoted to beauty (or even only to itself) became suspect. More pressing were questions of authority and interest, of exclusion and inclusion, and critical art practices took on such post-Duchampian topics as "Who conditions the context in which artworks are situated and by which they are certified?" Aesthetics for many became a productive problematic for art rather than a field delimited by notions of "the beautiful" as its proper expression; no longer attached to the ineffables of the beautiful or the sublime, a new aesthetics was, rather, addressed to the play of cognition and sociality. And this has been the case in advanced practices of the last 50 years.

Taxonomy is everywhere.

This past week, I did two Art Dirt Redux http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt interviews,that indicate a new discourse of sorts for the digital art arena. One was with Marc Garret of http://www.furtherfield.org and the other with [PAM] http://perpetualartmachine.com

Garret talks about node London, a media arts festival that was de-centralized and non-hierarchical and [PAM] talks about video art folksonomy. Things are getting interesting when you look at the steve.museum http://www.steve.museum as well.

Saturday before Easter was unseasonably warm and sultry. The art troops were out in Chelsea en masse, and in their shirtsleeves. I returned to Gladstone to seek closure in my discussion of Barney. I made a final visit to The Occidental Guest.

When Matthew Barney’s work first came to prominence in the early 1990s, it brought to mind the Warren Zevon song, Excitable Boy.

Well, he went down to dinner in his Sunday best
Excitable boy, they all said
And he rubbed the pot roast all over his chest
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he's just an excitable boy

He took in the four a.m. show at the Clark
Excitable boy, they all said
And he bit the usherette's leg in the dark
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he's just an excitable boy

I didn’t attend the recent press or invitational screenings for Barney’s new film, Drawing Restraint 9. But both word of mouth and published reports made me feel as if I had seen it – all 135 minutes of it -- even if most reviewers seemed to wish that they hadn’t. Having endured the entire 15 hours of his Cremaster cycle, I could certainly feel their pain. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, the flayed blubber of DR9 not far from the descending testicle of Cremaster. Barney’s aesthetic legacy from the earlier film seems to have survived remarkably intact. There is his narcissism, his addlepated attempts at creating a personal mythology, his fetishistic transgressions, his pretentious (and expensive) tropes of fashion, his overreaching symbolism, his staging of inane rituals, his plodding sense of narrative, his artless editing (like boxcars crashing together on rusty tracks) and insipid cinematography. Taken together, they constitute a singular cinematic achievement.

In her contract with negative space - making it the sine qua non of her oeuvre - Rachel Whiteread generally creates sculptures that beg the interaction of humanity while remaining forbidding, unpopulated, aloof. A ceremony, and therefore a narrative, is implied by her austere castings of the volumes beneath a ceiling, around a stairwell, against a bookshelf, inside a water tank. But this narrative is conspicuously denied. We are set adrift, frustrated in our attempt to give significance to her plinths, altars, sarcophagi. We are thrown back upon an academic contemplation of their formal qualities, all the while yearning to assign them some specific context of human activity, some aspect of the anecdotal, vernacular, religious. But her sculptures remain obdurately obscure to our interpretation. They are, in a word, sphinxlike.

Although Whiteread's work is self consciously monumental, her embrace of the void renders moot any discussion of progress or history, issues which often accompany the civic monument, and which, in fact, are the impetus behind the public commissioning of most monuments.